Skateboarding Rememberedby JOM ’12–’13

Skateboarding was everything in the late 70’s – the reason I woke up every day, the reason I slept on an inclined ramp. Once you got on a board you couldn’t get off, since back then we still thought you had to buckle in. Some people said we were just surfing on land, but we couldn’t hear them with the wind hitting us in our faces and oncoming traffic hitting us in our bodies.

Soon we had boards that could traverse any surface on earth, provided it was paved and protected from wind erosion. We lived for that pure adrenaline of stepping on a board and immediately falling backwards in a cool, backwards way.

The sport exploded. Kids were inventing tricks like the “kickflip,” in which you smoke pot then rotate the board in midair, and the “heelflip,” in which you smoke too much pot to perform a kickflip. You weren’t cool unless you could ride a board and you weren’t really cool unless you could ride more than one at a time.

We would look for swimming pools to empty and skate in. Then we’d look for empty pools to fill and soak in after a long day’s skate. This was before we wore helmets, and way before we wore them while skating. Cops chased us, but we were younger, faster, more ready to die, and most of our dads were lawyers.

Mostly, it was about rebellion. We wore our jeans tight, our hair long, and only conditioned it every other day. We grinded down handrails instead of going down stairs the usual way: sliding down handrails on your butt. We didn’t care what you thought unless you were a cute girl, or an ugly girl driving us to the Burger Shack.

Unfortunately, those times were short-lived. Some grew up and got real jobs as skate-park attendants and skate-park drug dealers. Others became super famous and forgot what the sport was all about: sticking it to the man and living with our parents.